Panelists:
Christie Griffin is the Senior Web Editor for Cosmopolitan.com
Noelle Hancock, Senior Writer for PageSix.com
Susan Kaplow, Executive Web Editor for Condé Nast
Streeter Seidell, Front Page Editor at CollegeHumor.com
Rachel Sklar, Media & Special Projects Editor at The Huffington Post
Moderated by: Jessica Strul, Ed Special Project Director
Jessica Strul: Welcome to Ed2010’s first ever dot-com panel. These are our wonderful panelists, I’ll introduce them all. Sitting to my right is Susan Kaplow. She’s the Executive Web Editor for Condé Nast. She runs a blog network there and she has two blogs currently and one on its way. Do you want to tell everyone a little bit about it, Susan?
Susan Kaplow: Sure. We’re developing a blog network that’s primarily a women’s blog network, and there are two sites that are live currently. One’s called elasticwaist.com; it’s all about weight obsession, body obsession, pop cultural obsession with body image. And the other one is dailybedpost.com, which is relatively new. It launched about 2 months ago, and Em and Lo write the majority of that content, so it’s really terrific. It’s really funny and certainly a little more risqué than anything we could run on any of the women’s sites. That’s largely the reason for doing this what we call satellite content, off in another domain; then it gives us a little more freedom than we have with a lot of our print properties and other web properties as results.
JS: Great, we’re so happy you’re here. And sitting next to Susan is Christie Griffin. Christie is the Senior Web Editor for Cosmopolitan.com. She’s the editorial point person for the site, which has grown from 12 million page views to 30 million page views since re-launching in May 2007, and Christie is part of Ed as well. Christie, would you like to tell us a little about Cosmo.com?
Christie Griffin: Well, Cosmo.com is actually owned by a chump in Florida named Chuck who won’t sell the domain name. But Cosmopolitan.com, it re-launched in May and actually Jess with the Cosmopolitan re-launch too before she went and left me for a full time job at CosmoGIRL!. But it’s doing really well, It went from 1 million users to about 1.5 to 1.6 now, which is 50 to 60 percent growth in 6 or 7 months. It’s just more than we could ask for. They say that we won’t be satisfied until we have 5 million unique users, so here’s to hoping.
JS: Great. And sitting next to Christie is Streeter Seidell. Streeter comes from CollegeHumor.com and he is their front page editor, but he also has a hand in everything including acting for some of those hilarious videos on CollegeHumor.com. Streeter, do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
Streeter Seidell: Sure. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the site; it looks like a lot of ladies in here and that is not our target demo. A couple drift over occasionally and then quickly leave. It’s kind of like a clearing house for silly, stupid, funny things. I make a lot of in-house content, a lot of videos, like it’s been mentioned, I act very poorly in many of them, being forced to, as with everyone on the editorial staff. My credentials here pale in comparison to everyone else’s, but we do have 6 million people a month, which is nice. It gives us an immediate audience to display our stupid, stupid wares to.
JS: We’re glad to have you here. And sitting next to Streeter is Noelle Hancock. Noelle is a senior writer for PageSix.com, and she has a really fun job where she’s the face of Page Six, and she appears on television, and she comments for entertainment news, and she has a great background; she’s worked for Gawker, Maxim, Rolling Stone, and lots of other great publications. Noelle, do you want to say a little bit about what you do at PageSix.com?
Noelle Hancock: Basically it’s the column but the online version. It was created because with the 24-hour news cycle, obviously there are stories breaking all day. So in addition to what you see in the print column, there’s a need to update and bring you the latest on what’s going on in the celebrity breaking news world. I was also at UsMagazine.com for almost 2 years before this, so that’s where I come from.
JS: So all of that celeb gossip we all can’t get enough of, Noelle, we can thank you for that. Let’s get started. We can start off with asking just a general question; what blogs do you guys read yourselves? Are you addicted to any certain blog that you have to check every day, and you’re the first one with the update?
Susan: It’s hard, I’m sure everyone in this room is faced with the challenge of not reading blogs all day and actually doing your work. I have that challenge all day long, but I definitely read. HuffPo is the first stop for me. Jezebel certainly, especially in what I do; I need to know all of the lady news up to the minute, and obviously they have the great ability to be able to say anything that they want, where on my blogs, we don’t have that luxury. So it’s really really nice to go and read the unbridled version of women’s magazine content that they do so well and then think about, okay, well ours has to be a little more bridled, so how do we do that in a fresh, fun, unstuffy, not at all tired, way. That’s always a first stop. Certainly I always read New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer. I find myself going there several times a day. Perez at lunchtime, guilty pleasure, just like everybody else. I like A Socialiate’s Life almost a little bit more than Perez for again just non-traditional media gossip. I think that they do a great job over there, and they’ve started to update more frequently, so that’s good. I read a lot of the New York Times blogs throughout the day, depending on the day of the week. I would say generally rarely a day goes by that I don’t check out Huffington Post, Jezebel, Perez, Socialite’s Life, and NY Mag.
JS: If you want to start reading a blog, is there one of those that you would suggest starting on? A daily blog?
Susan: I feel like they’re all really crucial. I mean, how can you say Perez Hilton is crucial, but in some ways, for what I do, he is because he’s the first to commentate. For instance, after the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame awards last night, he’s the first person to have Madonna’s image up there. He’s the first person to talk about her dress and her plastic surgery and/or injections, if she’s had them, and he’s the first person who’s really doing a lot of gnarly image gossip. From what I do, I need to see that and just see what he’s doing. And everyone else kind of bites off it all day long, so I do think he’s crucial, I do think he’s part of the zeitgeist online and he’s essential for anyone certainly in beauty, fashion, gossip and women’s media.
JS: Anyone else?
Christie: Well, there’s only two that I consistently read every day. I’ll go weeks without looking at Perez or Jezebel or anything like that, but I always will check out PopSugar. And when I’m on PopSugar, they have all their other sites like FabSugar, BellaSugar, and CitizenSugar with all of the election stuff, which my coworker got me into (giving a shoutout to Ashley, I see you!). And so that’s a stop I’ll make. And then the second stop, and this is pretty dorky, but it’s the Gawker Silicon Valley blog called ValleyWag, so it’s all the gossip on the west coast. And it’s not quite like Gawker, but it’s a little more, ‘Oh, the CEO of Google is doing this’ or whatever it might be. Not the CEO of Google, that was a horrible example; lately everything has been about Yahoo and how they fired everybody, and now they’re hiring everybody back, and everything about Zuckerberg, and so it’s the gossip in the Valley. So I like to check out ValleyWag.
Streeter: I went through a very dark time in my life where I was reading, or attempting to read, 50 blogs, because I felt like that’s what I needed to do to be successful. And then I realized there was no one measuring my success. I didn’t have to do that anymore. But I try to get around to BoingBoing every day, which is like a hyper dorky but very interesting site where they collect oddities. Wired has a couple good ones; their music blog is pretty on-point. I try not to read Gawker or ValleyWag just because it’s so mean. And not that I know very famous people, but my boss will be ripped apart sometimes on Gawker and I’m like ugh, assholes. But BoingBoing and Wired are two fun ones. And part of my job is finding things to link to all day, so I’m just constantly traveling around and looking at hundreds of websites a day. And if there is a guilty, very embarrassing celebrity site, it’s probably Egotastic, which is just like… I can’t believe, is that [tape recorder] on? I can’t believe I just said that. I do it for work, I have to do it for work, so that’s why I go there. Nope, I’m done.
Noelle: I have a whole list because I get asked this question all the time and I always forget. I also read Egotastic, People, Us Weekly, Perez Hilton, TMZ, Gawker, Jezebel, Daily Intelligencer, the Best Week Ever blog, Superficial, Dlisted, I mean it’s just constantly you’re sitting there hitting refresh, refresh, just trying to see who is breaking news or what new photos are popping up. And who else is there? OhNoTheyDidn’t, I’m Not Obsessed, I Don’t Like You in that Way, these are all people who are sitting there repurposing things in an interesting way. Other than that, there’s not enough time left in the day.
JS: That’s true. You get sucked into them, they’re like a black hole. Which that is part of the point, right? Like you’re saying part of your job is to connect to another site so you can just keep going, right?
Streeter: There is also, if I can add, this very very easy to use blogging service called Tumblr which launched a little while ago. And immediately everyone I know just got into it, and it will suck you in forever. It’s so simple to just follow all of your friends’ stuff that you will find yourself on it for hours. It’s horrible. If you value your career, do not start using this.
JS: Good career advice for all of you. So that was your web stuff; do you read exclusively web online stuff now? Do you read a print publication every month or every week? Is there something that you will only read in print versus online? Or does it not matter?
Noelle: I don’t like reading newspapers online. It’s just too much information, it’s so overwhelming. It’s just sensory overload. It’s like walking into Times Square, and I like the competition factor of ‘now I finished this section’ or this paper. Newspapers, magazines like InStyle or Lucky, things like that, I don’t really read them online.
Christie. I’m the opposite. I refuse to pick up a newspaper. I just go to Drudge Report and I’m like, that’s it. If it leads me to a story in the NYtimes.com or something, great, but I will never go to NYtimes homepage. But I would never pick up the newspaper either. I just go to Drudge Report.
Streeter: I think a lot of newspapers that are dealing with so much content all the time have trouble organizing it in such a way that it’s not intimidating when you open the page. The New York Times homepage is like, they’re just throwing up news all over you. And you’re just like, I don’t know, I’m leaving, I’m going to Drudge, where it’s like 3 words.
JS: I think this is something that everyone wants to know because web positions are so new; what do you guys do on an average day? When you get into the office, what time do you get into the office, what do you do? What’s your day comprised of? We know it’s a lot of blog reading, but besides that.
Susan: We get in and we have to update, because you don’t want to have a blog that hasn’t been updated by at least 9:30 eastern. We prefer for it to be 9 am, and often if we get the content and everything is read and evident the night before, we can time it so that it publishes at 8am the next morning. That’s often the way that we operate. But often there is content that needs to be read for that day, so we do that. And then to publish the blogs on our blog network, we use Movable Type 4.0, which is their latest package of that software, and we like it very much. It still has some bugs in it, but it’s so easy compared to TeamSite or any other content management system that anyone ever used. Blogging software today is just cakewalk and it makes the other stuff painful, truthfully. So it’s just easy and fast and it works well for us. And then we have various meetings throughout the day for different sites, different marketing stuff. We are about to launch a big partnership with Yahoo, so I have a team of about 5 other editors who help run all this stuff, so we just go through the lineup for all the Yahoo content. We’re syndicating content from the majority of the Condé Nast magazines, specifically women’s magazines, so we take a look at all of that. And we’re not just shoveling content into their syndication format, we’re really sort of curating it to make sure that it works well for Yahoo as well as deliver the right amount of uniques and traffic back to us. That takes a lot of work, actually, and so we concentrate a lot on that, and the day flies. It’s rare that we don’t have a fast day. We’re always saying that the day has flown by. But it’s good, we have a good group of people and our projects are well staffed and we’re not just putting out fires all day long, this is something that’s working for us.
Christie: I don’t feel like I have a set routine. For me, I come in the morning and see what updates need to be done for the day. Like Susan said, maybe blog posts or the homepage has an old slide that needs to be fixed or something, but for me, my days are basically based around top priorities of my task list. My to-do list is never done at the end of the day. I always come in the next day and it’s longer, so basically my day goes by in order of me being like, ‘okay, what do I have to do so that I don’t get fired.’ What do I have to do that’s on the homepage and is broken, or okay, I’m meeting with this person in 2 hours and I need an answer for this, I better go find that out now. Everything is prioritized because it’s a much different. You have a lot of different demands coming from a lot of different departments. Everything is like ‘oh, it’ll only take 10 minutes’ or ‘it’ll only take 20 minutes’ and you all of a sudden have this huge list of things to do. So everything I do is basically based on priority and typically the first thing in the morning is whatever your updates are for the homepage so that your site is fresh, but today, I think, was some blogs, talking to a blogger who is having a problem, sitting in a meeting, it’s just different day by day. But a year ago, when we were re-launching, I was in meetings all day, and then the day wouldn’t start until about 6 p.m. when everyone left. And then I would get into the content management system with other people and the freelancers and the associate web editor, and then we could get to work. So it’s kind of, it depends on I think where your website is at, too, if that makes sense.
Streeter: That’s horrible.
Christie: [laughs] Well, it’s not like that now.
Streeter: We roll in around 1, crack a couple of brews. I find that’s what a lot of people assume my job is, like we just drink all day, and they take the site’s tone as what it’s actually like there. And to some degree, that’s true; it is a very loud, kind of obnoxious office. Our ad people, who are all very serious business people, will be on the phones trying to close deals, and my coworkers are like screaming and filming something. I don’t know why they work there. So it’s this very fun, exciting environment, but you have a lot of eyeballs in front of you, and so what you’re doing, even though you can have fun and there’s this kind of free vibe going on, the stuff you publish needs to be good. It needs to be checked, and you need to go about that in a very professional way, even if you’re really drunk. The morning is given over to content management system through the submissions and I’ll pick which articles I want to put up, which pictures, which stuff to link to. And then the afternoon is given over to a lot of writing, or if we’re filming something, going to do that, and it’s easily one of the weirdest jobs in the world. One day, we just found ourselves on a bus going to film something with the dudes from Jackass in Brooklyn, who didn’t know we were coming, and it was awful, and it was like, I’m being paid for this? I have no qualifications to be doing this. But that’s also what makes it a lot of fun. But underneath all that fun atmosphere is quite a bit of awful boring hard work, which they didn’t tell me about.
Noelle: They never do. I come in at about 9 a.m. At that point, there have been 2 or 3 other staffers there since 7. They sort of stagger them throughout the day so that we constantly have a group of fresh bloggers coming in. Some people come in at 9, some at noon. Usually people who come in at noon are the ones who are covering the night events because they’ve been out at parties the night before. So again, it’s just going through the usual suspects, seeing what’s breaking, assigning editors, giving out various stories, saying you write this, you write that. Constantly checking the paparazzi sites to see who’s photographed picking their nose, and then we have somebody write that up. The news—
[Rachel Sklar enters]
JS: This is Rachel Sklar, our fifth panelist, who has had a very busy day. We were just talking about our average days.
Noelle: I feel like my day is really average, going after this guy [Streeter].
Streeter: Sorry.
Noelle: Maybe at the end of the day you have an event or something and I’ll go with a videographer and do red carpet, where you’re interviewing the various stars. Or sometimes you’re just there with a tape recorder and afterwards you go back and you write it all up so that it will be there immediately for people the next day.
JS: Okay cool. We’ll give Rachel a few minutes—
Rachel: No, I’m good. I’m Rachel, and I’d love to speak of the cautionary tale of actually looking at your book to find out what time you’re supposed to be somewhere instead of just thinking that you know. So I apologize. Average day, right? Average day usually starts the night before. I work for the Huffington Post and do media coverage, and now we have a media page that says sort of headlines and story aggregations, so that’s something that I used to do. Now, my role has sort of shifted to more calmness. So basically I try to be on top of everything that’s going on. The average day starts the night before looking at the headlines, making sure that I don’t miss anything even though I clearly often do. And then it really just depends; it’s often driven by the news cycle, what’s going on. A lot of times I have something that I’ve been planning to do, like I have an interview I’m going to transcribe or whatever, and it gets completely wiped off the map by breaking news. The most glaringly obvious being about what happened yesterday [Governor Spitzer’s scandal], which basically took over everything and really just every area of the media was taken over. I’m usually at the office around this time, and one of the reasons that I totally lost track of time is because everybody is always there. We usually stay through until the end of evening news and Hardball and often I’m there and realize that Olbermann has come and gone. I don’t have much of a life. But really it’s just about writing, most of the time. Once in a while I go to events and sometimes write them up. I don’t do fabulous red carpet things. And it’s just an interesting mixed bag because the Huffington Post sort of has its tentacles everywhere and as a media person, I’m used to covering whatever’s going on. Lately it’s been so much politics. I’ve found that I’ve had to be subsumed by it. But then it’s also Britney, as the Atlantic Cover has amply pointed out. And Lindsay Lohan in New York Magazine, and it’s not just because Lindsay Lohan did it, she flashed the boobs, but it’s also, is this what’s happening now? This was also a web story because New York had a ridiculous number of hits. I think that having Lindsay Lohan agreeing to do that for New York Magazine, and New York Magazine being the one to get that story and conceive that project sort of really solidified New York Magazine as clearly out into the top tier realm of magazines these days. So anyhow, so that’s in a nutshell, and I’m awesome at running late.
Cheryl Brody: What time do you get in in the morning?
Rachel: You know what? I’m embarrassed to say that I really actually get in sort of late but that’s because I basically wake up and pull my laptop onto my little lap. If you’re going to be on top of things from the beginning of the day, then its useless to waste precious minutes showering, picking clothes, getting up and traveling to work, because that time is better spent knocking off the Post or sort of conferring over IM with our media editor. It depends. I keep crazy hours, like stupid hours. Like I’ll be like ‘I can catch Hardball at 3, I’ll be up anyway.’ So I will allow myself to sleep in if I have that luxury. People usually expect to see me at the office around noon. But it depends. It’s just nice to get there in the morning.
JS: That’s great. So I think another thing everyone wants to know is, when something like the big story with Eliot Spitzer breaks or when the huge tragedy with Heath Ledger happened, you guys on a dot-com are kind of forced to pick that up and cover it as soon as you can, but you also have to make sure it’s accurate. Can it go through a vigorous fact-checking process like something in a print publication would, or is there no time for that? Is that fact-checking different? How does that work?
Noelle: The Heath Ledger story was huge. I literally went home that day and I had to be in the office at 6 or 7 am because I was on the early shift, and I saw the phone ringing. It was the office, and I was like oh god, what’s this going to be? I answered it and it was like just the whole place exploded. It was such a huge story. I mean obviously I work for a corporation, I work for News Corp, so you have to have a huge team of people behind you because you can get sued. So if it’s a story that you can possibly get sued over, it has to go through a group of lawyers. You just try to put in as many checks as possible. Hopefully you have a big staff behind you so that you can write up a story, send it to this person, they send it to this person, and then you put it up.
JS: So how long does it for you to send it to the lawyers and for them to fact-check it?
Noelle: It actually doesn’t go to the lawyers that often. There aren’t actually that many libel issues.
JS: Is it at your discretion, like if you’re like this is a little sketchy, you send it to them or to someone else just to check?
Noelle: Yeah, exactly. If all of us are sort of like, ‘I don’t know about this,’ hopefully you’re solid about your sources to do something like that. But it’s pretty much immediate. I remember working at Us Weekly when the Anna Nicole thing happened. My god, it was just ‘Anna Nicole passed out, there’s something going on!’ and then all of a sudden everybody’s just like, ‘Oh my god, she died!’ And you have the television on, and I had 10 people standing behind me like ‘Just get it up! Just two lines and then say story developing! Just publish, publish!’ I mean, it happens immediately. At this point, the exclusive is kind of dead. You put something up and two minutes later it’s everywhere anyway.
Rachel: But that’s the thing; you can do that. You can post something with a picture and two lines, and you’re first. So that’s actually something I noticed today, like yesterday MSNBC announced that they shuffled their lineup, they replaced the Tucker Carlson show with a show featuring David Gregory, and they renamed it “Race for the White House,” and they had a whole other bunch of other scheduling changes. So that press release went out, and I wrote it up, and Gawker put it up, and NY Mag, everyone picked it up. And today, Jack Steinberg from The New York Times wrote it up, and we sort of did a small story today and said, I guess maybe a teeny bit snarky, that ‘As we reported yesterday, the New York Times today noticed that…’ because it’s a different situation. You can do it, but not at the same token obviously print has different resources. The New York Times has different resources, and someone like Jack Steinberg will bring something different, oftentimes, to a story, because that’s his beat and so he’ll have a different experience and knowledge that someone working at a blog might not have.
JS: Does anyone else want to comment on that?
Streeter: Well, I’m a comedy writer, so everything I do is covered I believe under satire. Whatever, we’re protected, which is lovely. And when our lawyer does call, which he often does, I know I’ve done something very, very wrong that I’ll be getting an earful for it.
Susan: We certainly don’t report news in our blog network that way. I mean, when we do, like when Heath Ledger died, we have a daily chat show on one of our blogs, a daily video show, and we just did a very respectful little obit and our host, who is a comedian, just did something that was appropriate for us. But we’re certainly not in the same situation as Rachel and Noelle are in, so it’s not nearly as challenging. But we do have, because we are a gigantic corporation, when there is a question, there is a fleet of lawyers who are looking at everything, especially in terms of video, rights and syndication, music rights, and release forms, and you have to have your stuff really buttoned up or else everybody sees dollar signs. A lawsuit can start at $150,000 at the beginning before it hits your budget, and then skyrockets. So we do have to be careful, but our challenges are certainly not the same as they would be on the Huffington Post or on Page Six.
JS: When I asked you what your favorite blogs are, which sites you check every day, everyone kind of mentioned Gawker, Perez Hilton, there are a few names that everyone knows even if you’re not working at a dot com, even if you’re not in this world. So how do you develop and build a site with that magnetic following?
Streeter: You get pictures of people and you draw them doing coke. Ejaculate smeared [laughs]. That was my real answer.
Noelle: For me, it’s all about the writing. That’s what initially attracted me to Gawker, Elizabeth Spiers, who started writing it. She was just so funny and had this fresh take on things the way that nobody had ever had that before. It’s become much more common now. Snark is kind of universal, it’s hard to find sincerity these days. So that’s what initially attracted it to me. If I go to a site and I know that I’m going to be entertained by the writing, you trust that writer and you continue to go back. I think that Perez, it’s all about the photos. People love photos, and he posts them all the time and that’s, I think, why people keep coming back.
Rachel: But I think that also about Gawker. One of the things that took it to what it was when Elizabeth was doing it, to being such a must-read site, was because it was also such a great aggregator. It used to be that you wouldn’t miss anything if you went to Gawker, and so when blogging at Media Bistro doing the Fishbowl, that was a good barometer. Did I get everything, did I miss anything? It was sort of annoying if they got something first, but they also have a lot of manpower and they’ve been developing that. But I will say that I’ve stopped looking at Gawker the way I used to. I will get on at the end of the day and scroll, but if you look at that little box that often says how many posts in the last 24 hours, it’s crept up since Nick Denton took over as the managing editor and has crept up from like 45 posts, which is a ton, to I think the most I’ve seen is 78. And every single post, you have to click on more, and you have to scroll through pages, and it’s just too much. So it’s become not a useful aggregator for me. There’s just such an inundation of material on the web and you only have so much time for web playtime. So it just stopped being a must-read destination for me, casting no aspersions on the quality of the writing. I haven’t had a chance to get used to and have an opinion for the new people. They’ve had so much turnover. So I do think that when you talk about Elizabeth, so many people tuned in for Elizabeth, and then for Choire, and then for Jess Cohen, and then Alex and whatnot. But when there’s been a lot of turnover, it hasn’t had time yet to re-hatch on. At least, that’s my personal experience.
Christie: I think you can have a really kick-ass site, and great content and everything, but if nobody’s seen it, and I’m just going to that whole how do you make this great site question, if nobody knows it exists, then it’s just out there in cyberspace. So let’s say you have this blog, you have to be linking to other blogs and saying ‘I’m linking to you, will you link back to me?’ and just building up that blogroll or partnerships with other sites or your site will show up, if you have links on your site for .orgs or .govs, something that makes you a little more reputable, or if other sites are linking in to you, then you show up higher on Google. There’s just these tricks of the trade where you can have a really really great site but if no one’s linking to, or if it’s not showing up in Google or anything, then you just kind of don’t exist. A lot of that stuff you can learn hands-on or just by doing a little research.
Streeter: I think the common thread I see in a lot of popular sites and websites I go to is that there’s this very in-crowd feeling about it. Like if you go to Gawker for the first time, you’re like, what the hell is this. And only when you’ve read it consistently for a while do you feel like you’re really a part of something. And it gets harder as a site gets bigger, but the best sites still maintain that feeling. Like ooh, I’m involved with this, these are my people, we’re all one who hate each other [laughs]. I think those elements apply to Perez too, which I am certainly not a part of, and I see it on our site as well. It’s almost cliquey in a way. But that’s the key to creating and growing a successful website.
JS: Totally. And there’s also this trend I’ve noticed where certain websites will have a celebrity blogger, like Julia Allison for instance, where they kind of develop their own following. And that’s a really new thing for the web because they don’t realize that just from posting this blog that after a while, they do develop a following. Can anyone speak to that?
Susan: I think with Julia specifically, she’s a Denton-media created phenomenon. They created her, and Nick’s gone on the record saying this; he’s sort of obsessed with her, he allowed the obsession to happen, and so that constant Julia Allison news that’s pervasive, they created that. And then it all followed, but I feel like her celebrity is unique to Denton media. I don’t know if anyone would agree or disagree, but I’m not seeing that phenomenon as much in other places. Or maybe it’s just not coming to mind.
Rachel: The thing about Julia is that Denton enabled her, sort of like letting Frankenstein out of a lab. Once she was out of the lab, he couldn’t stop her. One of the reasons that her site does so well, I guess well now it’s over until she decides that she wants to come back, is the constant posting of content. And that is the number one driver of traffic. You get someone interested in your blog, interested in seeing what’s coming next, and then you constantly feed that beast and you’re going to get people checking back. And part of Julia’s genius as a destination is, half the people who come really like her, and half the people that come really hate her; they’re like ‘I hate her so much, I got to see what she does next or what she says she did.’ And she sort of has never been apologetic about it. She’ll just post anything, sort of like, ‘This is my diary entry from when I was 12,’ ‘This a picture of me on my birthday when I was 22,’ ‘This is me and my ex boyfriend, isn’t he cute?’ What she does is she posts the content that you would send to your friend or to your long-distance boyfriend except that everybody is privy to it. So there’s a certain intimacy about it which I think makes it appealing and I think that there’s a certain amount of honesty, that if the honesty was not there, then probably wouldn’t be as appealing. That’s my take. Julia is honestly fascinating.
JS: I know that this whole dot-com thing and the reason we’re having this panel is because it’s so new, and so many people out here want to know how they can get involved themselves. So could we just say a little bit about how you guys got started? I don’t think any of you probably studied it in school, so how did you come across it and get your background, that sort of thing.
Streeter: I was a junior in college and I’d been dumped by a horrible woman and was very depressed and would go out a lot, come home very late, always alone. I was much larger than I am too, which is, you can imagine was a very large man. One evening, I stumbled upon this website, College Humor, and started reading some of the stuff on there and was like, well I could do this, this isn’t hard. And I’d written a couple of things for my school’s student-run paper — I went to Fordham — so I sent them into the editor and got an email back the next day. And he was like, ‘Hey want a column?’ I guess the barrier to entry was very low at that point. It wasn’t nearly as big as it is now. And then after that, the day after my graduation, I went to write a book there and the just stayed on, just hung out, just chilled until this very day. Really simple. So that’s all you gotta do: get dumped, hate yourself, go online, and just start emailing people. It’s really that easy [laughs].
Rachel: That’s actually how it happens, though. Woody Allen said that 95% of life is just showing up, and it’s really unbelievable just how much doing it makes the difference, like actually reaching out and sending an email, actually writing a sample column or something. The Huffington Post is expanding to a ridiculous amount and you can all email me after, Rachel@huffingtonpost.com, and if you have a column idea, send it to me and it’ll be up to you, but if you want it, you’ll have a post on the Huffington Post within a day. I predict that 5 people tops will do that because every time I ever speak in public, I always throw that out there, and it’s the 5 people who do email me that, those are the people who are self-driven. Now see, all of you are going to email me [laughs].
Christie: I just wanted to work in magazines. It’s different now, but I had interned at CosmoGIRL! and my internship had ended, and I was just trying to make some money as a freelancer. One of my old bosses, she knew the web editor at CosmoGIRL! was going through a re-launch. This was back in ’04-’05, and he just needed a body. And that is honest to god still the truth today with a lot of websites; they just need bodies, people who are willing to dig through the content and repurpose it and scrape the text and fix the curly quotes, whatever it might be. Jess knows how it is; she did it, too, for me. And so that was my case at CosmoGIRL! and when they said, ‘Do you want to come on as a web assistant full time?’ it was like ‘Sure.’ I thought at the time, this is my in. This is my way of getting into magazines. And now it’s like, it’s been my bread and butter and I have no interest in being just a magazine editor anymore. It’s web all the way. It was a blessing in disguise because back in 2004-2005, nobody in magazines wanted to work on the web. It was kind of like, ‘Oh you work on the web?’ and now, it’s done me very well. Does that help you guys? So basically if people are looking for bodies, freelancers, that’s even the case at Hearst, they always have all of these freelancers, these random people, this SWAT team of people that are just doing shit for us. And there have been several of them who have been hired on the team. This one girl, she was a freelancer not even a year ago, now she’s an associate editor, now she might be the web editor of a website. Actually, I think she is. You just prove yourself and you just go do that process. That’s the case for something like this. It’s not necessarily like writing. I can’t really say that you guys can email me tomorrow and you’ll have content on the Cosmopolitan.com site because it’s Cosmo and we have plenty of stuff to put online.
Noelle: I was an intern at the New York Observer, and I was opening mail and fact-checking, and one day I opened an invitation to the “Sweet Home Alabama” premiere. And as I was handing it to my editor, I said, ‘If you can’t find anybody else to go, I’ll go.’ And again, it’s amazing what you can get when you ask. They sent me, and after that I started covering celebrity events, and that’s how I got into this whole celebrity thing. Gawker and blogging I got involved with because when I was at the Observer, I used to read Choire Sicha’s writing and we would just exchange witty emails back and forth and tool on people and kind of banter. And I left the Observer, and it just so happened that Jessica Cohen, who was the writer who took over for Choire, she was going on vacation for a week and they needed somebody to fill in. They needed a body. I had never blogged before, I had no HTML skills at all, and they just said, ‘Hey, will you do this?’ and sort of threw me in the deep end. I filled in for a week, and afterward, they said, ‘We’d love to use you and do other things with you.’ So I started covering parties for them and whenever anybody went on vacation, they would have me fill in. I was available, basically, is what it comes down to. And then one day, I was doing that for a while and I was also freelancing for a magazine, Janice Min, the editor-in-chief of Us Weekly emailed me out of the blue and said ‘Hey, do you want to start a blog for us?’ Like it’s that simple.
Susan: When I got out of school, I worked at Esquire, and I worked at Allure, and then I always was just all print all the way for a long time. And then I went to Seventeen, and then from there, when I was at Seventeen, Karen Miller had gone over there and we were revamping the magazine, changing it, and web was a little bit, it was part of it at that time and then I just had this feeling, it was right around when the first boom happened around ‘97 or ’98. And I’m like, I keep interviewing people who are entrepreneurial, who were doing all of these cool things, but I don’t want to write about them. I just want to do something. So instead of just writing about them, I wanted to see if I could turn the table a little bit. So with a bunch of other people, I went and we started Alloy Media and Marketing in ’97, which is all teenager content, marketing companies, it’s kind of everything. Clothing, catalogues, basically, if you’re a teenager and can be sold something, they’ve got their hands on you in some way. And that was at the beginning of really everything around ’97. That was just really great experience. The two guys I worked for developed the whole project in Harvard business school, and they worked at Goldman Sachs, and they built this website when they were interning for GE in Japan, and they were just like these business rock-stars. And we just built this company and basically went public before we were even a real company. We were basically doing everything backwards back then, but in the first bubble, before the bubble broke. So it was just total great education for me in digital media and business and at that point, I was like, it’s not about print to me anymore.
JS: Do you guys feel like when you’re writing for the web, you have to carry over the tone from the print publication? Is it different? Do you have more freedom with it? I was talking to some of you before and you were saying that you’re not even in the same building as them. Do you feel like you’re treated as a separate entity, is there some kind of church and state feeling, is it very friendly, what’s it like?
Streeter: We don’t even have one, so they are so de-emphasized to the point where I don’t even know them [laughs].
Christie: Cosmopolitan.com is pretty hardcore about staying on-brand to a tee. I put up a thing once that said “We got a widget! Wigdedy wigdedy whack” and I was like ‘Ha! That’s funny.’ And then it was like no, Cosmo would never say widgedy widgedy whack, so I had to take it down. It’s to a tee whatever your voice is in the magazine is your voice online. The same with our content — if we’re not running stuff in the magazine about how to lose ten pounds, you’re not going to find it on Cosmopolitan.com. And that’s mostly because it is such an established brand with such an expectation that there’s a lot of pressure. And there are so many different platforms; radio, mobile, and web, that you really don’t have that freedom to deviate away from it. We are definitely on-brand.
Noelle: Us let me get away with a lot of stuff in the beginning just because the website was just starting. There hadn’t really been anything like that before, and I think they loved watching me have fun with it, have fun with celebrities. Every once in a while I’ll come back on an old post that I wrote and I’m like, ‘My god, they let me put the word ‘douchebag’ in a headline? I can’t believe that, that’s amazing.’ But as time went on, as it should, advertisers get involved and people start paying more attention, and then it’s time to back down and start basically catering to your audience and keeping with the brand. Page Six, they have actually been really great about letting us explore our own voices and they very much want us to be our own brand within the brand, so I’m lucky they let us have a lot of fun with it and toe the line.
Rachel: Huffington Post is such a huge behemoth now that it’s starting to turn. Someone joked to me today that new media was turning into old media. I’ve been really lucky because I was able to start my column and my site ground up, and no one ever told me what to do. There have been so few instances where anyone was like, ‘You really might want to tweak this.’ It’s just been for me to do what I want. If I want to post something at 4 in the morning, I do. To a certain extent, they actually support everyone having an editor. That’s what I do – I run stuff by people before to make sure there’s no mistakes and save me from myself if I’m saying something really stupid. But I would not accept presentation-wise and all that and what I say is I’m hoping that it’s not too terrible. I’m a very purely internet person. I didn’t really say anything before about where I came from, but I used to be a lawyer. I quit law to be a freelance writer and basically my life for maybe a year and a half was checking Ed2010 and Mediabistro to see if there was something out there. It was Elizabeth Spiers actually who left Gawker and took over at Mediabistro. Her blogger for Fishbowl NY had left and she was desperate. Desperate. And so desperate that she came to me. And so I learned HTML the night before I did my first test post and then it was in it. So it’s such a different situation. Even in my very very short time doing this, I’ve seen what a difference between the skills that used to be required and now. And as you were saying, the attitude that magazines used to have about the web versus now, now the web is very cool. We [Cheryl Brody and I] met at Jane when Jane was really putting everything into their website, and you guys got it because you started really pushing such original specific web initiatives. And that’s where it seems to be going.
Christie: The one thing that I didn’t touch on with if you have a print publication or other platforms other than the web is that what we’ve been able to do is experiment with traditionally unpopular topics in the magazine. So maybe we would never touch on weight loss, but something that maybe doesn’t do as well in the magazine, or we don’t run a lot, we can experiment online. We don’t run a lot of stuff in the magazine about getting over a guy because that magazine’s all about getting a guy and being single and happy and fun, but maybe we’d run a blog about a breakup or something. And that does really well online even though that doesn’t do hugely well in the magazine. So the one thing that is great where you’re not maybe going too far away from the voice or the brand is that you can experiment different topics, that strategy. That’s the one thing where if you are working on a website where you are trying to balance these different demands, you can kind of be like, well we can try it out and see where it goes from there. We can always take it down.
Susan: That’s why we started this satellite blog network at Condé Nast, to give us the freedom to develop the kind of content that we can’t publish on our main sites and content that wouldn’t be constrained by the demands of advertising and/or these gigantic brands. For instance, on Dailybedpost.com, our sex site, there are pictures of sex toys and stuff on there on a daily basis. You’re not going to find that on Glamour.com; Em and Lo are two Glamour columnists, but obviously that content would never appear on Glamour.com. This gives us the ability to write edgier stuff for women that might not necessarily go to Glamour.com for content and/or read Glamour magazine, but by being in the Daily Bedpost environment, by reading it, by tapping into a different user, then eventually they will come over to the column at some point and experience that. And so the idea behind the satellite network is to create new content for people and to introduce them to the brands via this approach, so creating content that’s freer.
Q&A SECTION
Question #1: For those of you who work for the websites of print publications, and maybe also for Huffington Post, how does it get handled if you have a scoop that maybe the print side wants to reserve for them instead of running it on the website?
Noelle: That’s a huge thing, especially at Us, which is a weekly. We’re at a point where nothing holds anymore. It’s amazing. Every single time we would decide to sit on a story or we want to save this for the cover, it would always break somewhere else inevitably. There’s just too many people in the business and too many photographers out there. So I think that magazines are now having to play the game different and use their websites to break news and then use the magazines to take it further. If you look at a lot of magazines these days, like Us Weekly, they’ll have an interview with Miley Cyrus or an interview with people from “The Hills” because if they’re going to put Britney on the cover, you know what, that was old days ago. We read that days ago. It’s hard to make that decision.
Rachel: We don’t hold anything. What’s really interesting, this isn’t really something that I’m involved with because it’s not my area of expertise, but people at Huffington Post are starting to get really really sharp with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It just basically draws traffic to your site. So whenever anything breaks, it’s like a little game that they have trying to put in the different search terms, as many as possible, and then doing those searches in Google and seeing where HuffPo comes up. Whenever we rank the first or second link, we do a great job. Sometimes that can backfire because when you’re covering a story in real time, you’re basically aggregating all of the information. We have enough people who do the reporting that you can do via being really really good on the web, so I think yesterday with the Spitzer stuff, Huffington Post was the first to have Emperor’s Club images because the site had been taken down, but they were savvy, and we’ve seen the images from HuffPo showing up in different places on the web, like on ABC’s story, just because we were the first ones to have them and I guess the best ones. But when a story is developing, like a good example is the Hillary Clinton hostage situation, I guess Carl Cameron from Fox News who was also covering it live, they zeroed in on this one guy, so all of the resources were zeroing in on this guy; does he have a Facebook page? Does he have a MySpace page? What can we find out about him? Gathering all of that information up into just a page where you dump all of the information, and then it wasn’t that guy. And everyone was like, well we’re going to switch over to the other guy. And then the first person, everyone was trying to take off the tags or updating it. But it was just sort of interesting; it shows the hazards of covering a story as it’s breaking and doing it as an aggregator, because you source everything and you’re being accurate, but what if you are taking something wrong from elsewhere? That can be dangerous.
Question #2: For those of you who take content from outside places, what is the best way to pitch you?
Streeter: Money [laughs]. I find, because I get tons of email from kids who are pretty much like me when I was in college, just drunkenly emailing and being like, ‘I can write for you,’ it’s always nice to get a professionally-worded email with samples. It’s always nice when someone can hit a universal topic; for my readers, it’s mostly college-scene things, that hit it in such a way that I haven’t seen before, like presented to me in an interesting way. One thing we’ve found a ton of success with is telling a story through something like a Facebook news feed, which everyone immediately latches onto, they know what it is, they’re like ‘I know this!’ and then revealing kind of the joke through that format. But I think a lot of people online will, at least with our site, try to emulate our tone while they’re trying to pitch themselves, which is a horrible mistake. They’ll be like ‘Sup man, what’s going on? Yo bro, you gotta check out this article I wrote.’ Like no. you’re just not happening. I take it you probably won’t be submitting to my site. But if you have any beer pong ideas or whatever.
Christie: Cosmo does take submissions, Cosmopolitan.com does. I made it sound earlier as if we don’t, but for us it’s not so much one-off articles, because we have a lot of that. But if you have an idea for the website for a regular thing you’d want to work on, that I would be interested in. so if someone went onto the website first, took a look around, figured out what we’re doing, maybe what we’re missing or what we’re trying to do more of or something, and then wrote me and said, like for example, we have 30 day blogs. It’s something pretty new on our site. If someone sent me a pitch tomorrow that was like, ‘I have a blog, I’m going to get my boyfriend to propose to me in 30 days. I’ll write you a blog post for 30 days. Here’s my pitch for my first post,’ I would probably sit there and be like, ‘huh. Really. Send your picture.’ I want to make sure you’re not this weird crazy guy or something and not like a cute Cosmo girl. We like pictures. So that sounded bad, but you know what I mean. We’re going to put your picture up with the blog because it’s like who is this blogger, you know? That’s the first thing. It’s like whoever is writing for us, we want to make sure that they are kind of like Cosmo. So if the pitch is really good and it’s something that can be consistent on the site and isn’t just a one-off thing, if you would be a valuable new writer to me, when yeah I’m interested in hearing from you. So in my case, in Cosmo’s case, and I think for a lot of websites, it’s just knowing the website and being able to bring something new from it and not just looking for a clip.
Question #3: It sounds like you all learned HTML and content management systems on the fly when you got thrown into the online world. It seems like today that wouldn’t fly so much. It seems like editors want more specific online experience. Could you speak to that, or if you don’t have any, how do you teach yourself? Would you rather have a really good editor and writer and teach them how to plug it into the system?
Susan: Anyone can learn HTML.
Rachel: You can learn it in a day. You should learn it, because it’s just more efficient. It just takes as much time to tell some people ‘bold this’ ‘link this.’ Just honestly start a blog on Blogger or whatever and just write one thing a day, teach yourself how to do stuff. I am living proof that even if you are not intuitive about anything computer-y, that you learn it. It’s meant to be user-friendly.
Noelle: You don’t even need to know how to do HTML. It’s so user-friendly, blog software is as easy as using Microsoft Word. There are all of those little buttons there, if you want to link something, you just highlight a phrase, click on the little chain symbol, and it’s a link.
Susan: That’s why blogging software is so great and when you look at like TeamSite and you look at a lot of these content management systems that a lot of editors are still using, and it’s painful to watch because it’s very slow, it’s clunky, it’s cumbersome, it’s all these things that I think, I haven’t talked to any programmers at TeamSite lately, but I would hope that in order to stay competitive in the market, we’re going to see the simplicity and the cheapness of blogging software is going to have to edge those other guys out in the market place. They’re going to have to make a competitive product that is easier for us, even those of us in big corporations, to deploy across the whole company because that old way of doing things with cumbersome websites where a lot of HTML is demanded is, I like to hope in a few years, it will be obsolete.
Streeter: Yeah, everything’s thrown off CSS. HTML is like the dinosaur.
Christie: But that’s if you’re looking into web editing. You go on a web job board or something, all you’re going to see is ‘looking for a developer ninja’ or a coder, a flash coder, whatever. That’s stuff that you need to learn and you can’t walk in the door and be like, ‘oh you’re not going to teach me how to build this flash application?’ None of us know how to do that. And that’s a whole other skill set, and those are the guys that are like listening to techno and just like working away—
Streeter: Virgins.
[laughs]
Noelle: You can take a class. I’m sure there’s one out there. If there isn’t there will be soon because it’s an exploding thing.
Susan: And there are tutorials on the web that you can just sign up for and practice, but I think video editing is something that, that’s the wave. And if you’re going to focus on whether it be Final Cut or whatever video editing software, I think young editors do need to know that now, and the type of people that I’m hiring, I need them to have video experience. And a lot of them are learning it on the fly, as am I. but that’s where it’s at.
Streeter: Something else helpful is, a lot of websites, specifically mine, don’t make room in the budget for illustrators, so if you want artwork for your article, you’re either begging one of the design people do to it for you or you’re doing it yourself. So I would say learn Photoshop and Illustrator ahead of HTML. It’s such a more useful skill.
Christie: That’s a really really good point. Photoshop.
Streeter: Illustrator is a lot of fun. A little harder than Photoshop, but if you just mess with it for a couple weeks, you become pretty good.
Rachel: It’s true because actually I know everyone loves RSS and all that, and yes it’s very efficient, but I’m sort of an old-school purist. I think that on blogs, I like the way the individual posts look. I think the image that you choose to accompany the text is equally important, and I get kind of great pleasure out of the perfect image. And Photoshop is great, It’s great to be able to superimpose someone’s head onto somebody else’s body. It’s just fun, and it’ll always be fun. And I think that if you do it well, that’s a skill.
Streeter: Have you ever seen me fighting a tiger? Because I have [laughs]. I’m just saying, I can do that.
Question #4: Given the speed of online technology and everything compared to the conventional print, which seem to have more old-school editorial restrictions, have you ever blogged something where it’s been ‘uh oh, damn, I should not have done that.’ How do you deal with that? Maybe you said something that you shouldn’t have, or you pushed a button you shouldn’t push, in terms of how it affects your hits or how people reacted to it.
Rachel: That’s why you should look at it before you post it. But sometimes yeah, it’s really boom boom boom, so sometimes you’re like ‘I really hope I’m right!’ and then if you’re not right, you do an update or something. It’s really so important, the strikethrough is the blogging thing you do to show that you’re wrong, or you do an update or something. Be very clear about the path that you made a mistake. And if you’re always upfront when you’re wrong, then that just means you’re right the rest of the time.
Streeter: I think that the ‘must update quickly’ atmosphere also leads you to sometimes not think about all of the interests on your site. I’m recalling one instance where I’d written this article about Papa John’s pizza, and it was Papa John, the guy, and he’s in the commercials and always so nice and friendly, he’s like ‘Come to Papa John’s.’ I’d written this article where he’s like berating his staff and being like ‘You’re all a bunch of motherf*cking losers. You’re never going to do it. Domino’s is crushing us, what are you doing about it?’ And it was very awful but so bad that it could never be taken seriously. I posted it, and within 10 minutes, one of our ad guys burst into the editorial office and is screaming at me. Apparently it cost us like a $50,000 ad deal that we had on the table with them, but I kind of forgot. And the best was the ad buyer had emailed and said that Papa John would never talk to his staff like that [laughs]. So in that instance, it was like the damage had been done. We lost the deal, I had to go have a chat with my bosses about that, so yeah. You certainly can do an amount of damage very quickly. And I could’ve deleted it, but it was already out there. It had already done its work.
Noelle: By the time that you delete it, someone else has copied it and pasted it and put it on their blog. Google cache never forgets. This is what’s so hard this day, like Julia Allison had this. She was putting all of this stuff out there, and then all of a sudden she’s regretting it. But it’s like, you can’t take it back. So if you’re putting something out there and you’re not sure about it, run it by a friend just to make sure. Think, my mother is going to see this, my future in-laws are going to see this. My future employer is going to see this. What are they going to think? I think it’s really hard with online branding these days. Say you start out early on your blog and you’re writing about sex or something, or vibrators, and then in a few years down the line, you decide you want to be a writer for the New York Times. Well, they’re going to Google you and this is what they’re going to find.
Streeter: And they don’t even have a vibrator section. [Laughs]. I think we’re also in that horrible age where we kind of didn’t think about that when we were young and so we’ve already put it all out there. And kids now, I think maybe are a little more conscious about that. They know about that more.
JS: But even if they do, like Streeter writes for CosmoGIRL! but he’s been in the New York Times, so it is possible, right?
Streeter: Yeah, I robbed this bank, and I got some press [laughs]. If they do a Google search on me, I don’t think there’s anything too bad to find. Image search is another problem.
Question #5: Who edits you guys, in terms of when you’re doing blog posts and that sort of thing? Are you supposed to self-edit? Obviously it’s a very different process than the print world.
Rachel: As HuffPo grows, it’s more institutionalized now. A bigger post or one that takes more of a shot at someone, or calls something out, or is making a political point, I definitely send that out for double-checking and casting an eye over. Before that was never in place and it was just like ‘okay Rach! Go ahead, do your thing!’ I had my own safety net. Whoever’s G-chat green light was on, they get the job, and that’s it. Everybody should definitely have that because I always make typos. But it’s also because of like, the ‘widgety widgety whack,’ which I would totally do. I love it. But sometimes you press publish and you’re like ohh, that may not have been such a good idea. But I imagine that it’s more stringent as we go down the line [with the other speakers].
Streeter: My boss is like 26-27 and definitely is not looking at anything I do. But I try to do right by the boy, so it’s nice.
Noelle: At Us, they learned very quickly we needed a copyeditor when I misspelled the word “card” in headline. You’re so sleep deprived and you’re just making all of these mistakes. So at Us, it was like I would send it to a senior editor who would send it to a copyeditor who’d send it to a fact-checker, and it was all going very fast, but I think it pays to sign off with one or two editors. But I think that’s the great thing about the web also. When I was writing for magazines, you would write an article, it would go through 10 people, come out 5 months later, and you wouldn’t even recognize it anymore. It didn’t feel like you, and then your name is on it, and you don’t even like that your name is on it, but at blogs, it feels like so much of your voice because you’re not as heavily edited.
Question #6: You guys mentioned a few skills to have, like Photoshop, learning how to make yourself look like you’re fighting the tiger. I was just wondering what other advice you have for young college grads who are eager to break into the dot-com magazine world, besides Photoshop and having good ideas.
Christie: I think elbow grease and forward thinking goes a long way. I mean, I do not care if someone worked at AOL in 2000 and Yahoo in 2004. I don’t care. What is going on right now in 2008? Being able to come in and sit there and know what Tumblr is and what he was just talking about. I’m mildly appalled if I have an intern who doesn’t know how to use MySpace. I’m like, you’re an intern. You’re supposed to be on MySpace, what do you mean? As far as advice goes, being able to roll up your sleeves, whether it’s on the street videos either on the red carpet or stripping texts or just resizing photos, being able to be very flexible but also being that young user and knowing what the hell is going on, that really goes a long way.
Streeter: I think being plugged into the culture of the site you’re trying to get on is pretty important, too. I think Christie mentioned, assessing what’s missing and offering to fill that gap is always important.
Noelle: Whatever you want to be doing, start doing it now. Here’s a story: I was applying for a job at Stuff magazine, and I thought I’d had it in the bag because I’d interned there, I knew all the staff, I was friends with them, I aced the edit test, and I didn’t get the job. And the girl who did get the job had sent in a mock Stuff magazine, where she’s written her own headlines, her own captions, and they were like, it was just so dead-on and tailored to our magazine that we knew we could just plug her into anywhere because she’d already done it. My advice if you want to get into gossip blogging, go out to the clubs. See what you see, and go home and write about it, and get it right, and start sending it out to the other blogs. Most of us editors, we are too tired and too old to be out in the clubs, so if you’re out there and you’re doing something that we’re not doing, that’s valuable to us.
Rachel: Going to things and doing stuff. If there’s an Obama rally happening in Washington Square Park and write something up or send something in, like this happened, because news happens all the time. And so that’s a really really good piece of advice. I really strongly think that absolutely whatever you want to be doing, do it. I strongly think that starting a blog is great for writing skills. I’m working on this book right now and when I started it, I realized how different my writing was because of blogging. I had all of these impulses like I just wanted to link. This thing has so many footnotes because I just wanted to link to so many things, and that’s the old-fashioned way of linking, was footnotes. It’s really affected my voice, but I think it just makes you faster and snappier and sort of like you can find the punch-line. You figure out the rhythms of what you’re going for, you can test your range, write up a thoughtful long essay or report a story, you can do anything. It’s just like paper except it doesn’t kill any trees. And you don’t have to store it. It’s pretty awesome, actually. So I think that do everything that you want to do for yourself and offer to do it for free, because that’s how you rise. You do good stuff, and then people start to notice, and people start to pay you, and people start to pay you more, and pretty soon people recognize your name, and then you’re famous [laughs].
JS: Rachel, can I ask you, I think a lot of this is doing outside stuff, like you’re writing a book while you’re writing for the Huffington Post. How do you have the time for something like that?
Rachel: I don’t, which is why the book is late. The book also changed. It was supposed to originally be sort of a light, humor, almost jokey thing, and it’s turned into a serious exploration and I’m interviewing lots of people and stuff. So that’s another reason why it’s late. But it’s also because when you’re tied to the news cycle, it’s really hard to get off that ride. It’s impossible. It’s impossible to be tuned into it all day and then go home and be like ‘oh I’m just going to sit and work on this in-depth project.’ It’s very difficult. I do think though that it is important to try to do outside stuff. it just really depends. I’ve tried to do certain freelance assignments, so one thing I try not to do is turn down freelance assignments in Canada, because none of my friends or my parents friends, they’re like, ‘Huffington Post, is that like the Washington Post?’ People sort of don’t really know. They don’t care about anything that I do in New York, but if they see something in the Global Mail or the National Post, they get really excited. So I do try to do that. But I just think it’s a question of the time that you have and what your goals are, how driven you are, how much sleep you need [laughs].
JS: Thank you all so much. I know I’ve definitely learned a lot. You were all very very awesome. Just a couple Ed announcements. We mentioned here, how do you get the web skills. Ed is planning to have a web class where we will teach you a few things, and have some editors there and stuff like that, so stay tuned.